


Chrysalis

by elo_elo



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Eventual sweetness, F/M, Female Friendship, Fluff and Smut, Healing, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Lyrium Withdrawal, MC is not the inquisitor, Mage-Templar Dynamics (Dragon Age), Mage-Templar Tension, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Cullen Rutherford, Slow Burn, Smut, Sort Of, bc aforementioned mage-templar tension, bc we cant not have that, but a lot of the games event occur, complicated family shit, same dynamics, same feeling, some tweaking of established lore, youll see - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:41:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: It’s been two decades since Orianna Trevelyan laid eyes on her sister. Erased like a stain from the tapestry of her family tree, locked away in Starkhaven’s Circle and left to languish. The rebellion gives her freedom, a renewed chance at a life. And then it’s gone in an instant. A wound in the sky, the world at war, her sister returned, hand outstretched, palm shorn in two by the magic their family so loathed. And an ex-templar that she should fear, but doesn’t.
Relationships: Cullen Rutherford/Female Trevelyan
Comments: 40
Kudos: 74





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, so dipping my toes into more canon complaint work. While I love to read it, I don’t usually write in this genre so…bear with me lol.  
> I hope you enjoy <3

“Aren’t you afraid,” she says, pulling at the collar of her robe. Orianna watches her colorless fingers tremble as she tries to secure the brooch at the base of her neck. She’s never spoken to this mage before today, never so much as even noticed her before now. A timid girl from the Montsimmard Circle. Young. Maybe no older than eighteen. She has the kind of soft watery eyes that would have made her an easy target at the Circle in Starkhaven. Orianna fidgets, her own robes suddenly heavy on her shoulders. She doesn’t like the way this proximity, this _place,_ is making her think of things like this. Old hierarchies, old feelings. The girl shifts, bouncing from one foot to the other, eyes darting around the room where they’ve been told to wait. “Aren’t you afraid that they’ll kill us?”

Orianna stiffens, pushes that bright spark of fear inside of her down until it burns itself out, just ember, char. She glances at the doorway. The fire in the hearth at her back casts shadows across the stone. The tapestry hung liberally over the walls does nothing to keep the chill out. She’d felt it first as they rode toward Haven, the twisting spire of the old temple appearing over the tops of the pines. Cold. A bad omen. “The templars?” The girl doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. Orianna can feel them, knows this girl can too. After months of reprieve, her body is once again attuned, the lyrium in her blood searching them out, the basest of her instincts recoiling in fear. A push and pull. She straightens up, letting her hair fall down her back, brushing cross the soft fur along her robes, the polished wood of her staff. “They’re the ones who should be afraid.” And she says it even though it feels hollow, sounds hollow. She says it even though just the thought of them – skin hidden under metal, eyes peering from the slits in their helmets – fills her with an almost childlike fear. But it’s fleeting. She numbs it quickly away, turns back to look at the smoldering hearth, the shadows dancing quick against the stone as the embers die.

The mage beside her bounces on her toes, jittery. “How long are we going to be waiting?”

Orianna looks over at her, wonders, for the first time, how long she had been in a Circle. If this is all somehow new. Patience is a mage’s virtue, after all. The girl shivers beside her. Orianna looks out the room’s single narrow window, tired of looking anywhere else. The temple is old, maybe even older than the second blight; all the windows she’s seen aside from the grand stained glass at the front, just wide enough to slip an arrow through. More of a fortress than a temple. And they’ve been waiting in this room for the better part of an hour, the thick, stone walls looming. No rhyme or reason as to why. That’s all they’ve done since they’ve arrived. Waiting and watching and worrying.

Catherina told her, holding her tightly before Orianna left Redcliffe, that the Grand Enchanter was staying in the city, another dark-haired elf going in her place. The news felt old, like ancient tactics of warfare she’d before only read in books. And ominous. Because she knew, still knows, that there is a chance the templars will kill them all here, a chance that the Divine will reassert the power of the Chantry through force. It’s why Catherina held her so tightly just outside Redcliffe’s gate, their fingers digging into each other’s arms, the sun bright and hot on their backs. Orianna brings her hand to her chest, curls her fingers around the pendant laid close to her skin. Orlesian jade. Her own dark sapphire hanging now around Catherina’s neck, days away. A promise, maybe, to return. Or a hope, maybe, that even if one of them did not…Orianna tightens her grip on the pendant, sets her jaw. She doesn’t want to die but for this, she would, without question. Because the alternative, those great, high walls of the Circle come rising again around them all, is a death of its own. “I heard you have family.” Orianna stiffens, glancing again over at the young mage at her side. She _must_ have only recently come to a Circle the way her fear is so plain on her face. Orianna isn’t sure when she learned to turn that fear inward, to guard it closely to her breast, but it’s hard to remember a time before then. The young mage blinks at her, eyes still wide and watery. “Just a rumor I heard. That your family’s here. At the Conclave.”

Orianna swallows, the tendons in her neck pulled taut. “Yes, I imagine the Trevelyans have sent an attaché in support of the Templars.”

“Are you hoping to catch a glimpse of them?”

Orianna’s chest tightens. She remembers dark hair curled around her small fingers, the sound of the ocean in the middle of the night, the warm smoke of pinyon wood in a hearth fire. Faint, disjointed. She curls her fingers again around the jade. She tucks the memories and the longing and fear deep down inside of herself and turns away from the girl, looking back at the door, at the stone beyond it “What for?”

They say, in halls and courtyards where Orianna hasn’t been in nearly a lifetime, that _mild in temper, bold in deed_ is perhaps the oldest joke in the Free Marches. A phrase oft-repeated by those of her blood as they stand before magistrates to answer for bloodying a shopkeep, toppling a table, beating a horse. _Mild in temper, bold in deed._ Orianna feels like she could punch a wall. “I’m a talented mage.” She feels childish saying it, hissing it to the enchanter so as the others in the room can’t hear. “I deserve to be here.”

The enchanter, an elven woman with long, straw colored hair and the remnants of faded Dalish tattoos across her cheeks, is unmoved. “You’re a talented mage. And that’s why I’ve chosen you to be an escort.”

Orianna breathes hard through her nose, she’s almost shaking with rage. Wholly misplaced, nearly out of control but she should _be_ here. She _wants_ to be here. At the end. Or perhaps the beginning. “The arlessa brought an entire entourage of soldiers and mercenaries with her. I fail to see the need for a few mages to help ferry her back to South Reach.”

“The _arlessa_ has been exceedingly generous in her support of our rebellion. Escorting her is a show that her support has material benefit.”

Orianna glances around the room. There’s a templar in the far corner, helmet off. He nods at Orianna when their eyes meet. She turns away from him, tries to shake off the way just that look has the power to reduce her, make her feel small. “Why is she leaving anyway?”

The enchanter purses her lips and for the first time since their conversation began, the white hot Trevelyan temper subsides, replaced instead with a heavy sense of dread. “I’m not sure.”

Orianna narrows her eyes. “Has something happened?”

“I’m not sure.”

She lowers her voice to a hiss, steps closer to keep the templar from overhearing. “I should be here if something has gone wrong. You’ll need as many mages here as you can if they decide to end this on their terms.”

“Nothing has happened, Orianna. And, besides, the arlessa has made her stance on commoners _very clear_. You’re one of the few noble mages we have here.”

It rankles. Immediately. “The chantry stripped me of my title when I came into my magic, as you well know.”

“Funny how little that matters.” The enchanter glances over her shoulder at the templar then back at Orianna. “And if you are as intent on distancing yourself from your noble birth as you protest to be, perhaps you should start doing as your told.”

The arlessa, for all the coin and men she lent the mages, doesn’t seem to want to speak to them. Or anyone, it seems. They travel for two days in the kind of thick silence that reminds Orianna uncomfortably of the library in Starkhaven’s Circle. The thick curtains of her carriage never moving once as they travel the dusty road south, Orianna’s borrowed horse fussy and nervous. _Where does she take a piss,_ she imagines Catherina laughing, _maybe she’s dead in there._ Might as well be, for the heavy wall of silence around the riding party. No quiet conversation, not even the shifting of skirts, the horses quieter than she’s ever heard horses be. Even the mercenaries in the arlessa’s employ whisper over their moonshine beside the fire at night. And each night Orianna stares up at the stars, the chill heavier in the air with each mile south they go, and finds the sky and the road and the woods beyond it terrifying in their vastness. So sleep becomes like dreams and dreams become like daylight and her own mind is so muddied with thoughts of the rebellion and the Circle and the conclave that when the first tremors send pebbles rolling across the road she’s sure it’s some figment of her tired imagination. And then it washes over them. A sound so loud it pushes them all back, shakes the earth so violently Orianna’s sure that it will split like a fissure, send them all tumbling toward Orzammar. But the earth holds and the sound doesn’t cease, growing louder and louder, sending the horses scattering, sending Orianna hard onto her knees. She presses her hands tightly to her ears, opens her mouth in a scream that is so drowned out by the sound all around them it feels as though her lungs have been scorched, throat parched and useless. And when the sound is gone, her ears ringing as she tries to keep herself upright on the road, a smell washes over her. A metallic rot. Like lyrium on the breath of templars that have strayed too close. Orianna stands, shaky as a foal on her legs, and then she sees it. The whole sky cast in green, a swirling mass of nothing where the sun should be.

“We’re dead.” The other mage, a slender man with bouncy curls on his head comes shaking back to his feet. He’s holding himself, staring wide-eyed at the sky. “We’re all dead.” His voice cracks, rises several pitches. “I knew the Maker would punish us! I knew we should have stayed in the Circle!”

Orianna takes a long breath, closes her eyes. She runs her hands down her body, is almost surprised to find herself in one piece. She curls her shaking fingers into fists and looks again up at the sky. Ash drifts like snow through the air. Orianna turns to look down the road. The arlessa has fled, her trunks scattered along the road. A few of her hired men are picking through the valuables that have come loose, a few more stand, just as she had, staring at the sky. “Hey lass,” one of the men, standing at the center of a small circle of them, calls to her. “There’s a town a ways over. We’re gonna try and make our way there. Might be you’d like to join us. Dangerous for a mage alone on the road.” He nods toward the sky “’Specially with whatever that shite is.”

The hole in the sky moves faster than any word of what it is. Stretching, yawning, undulating. New shapes every morning. Like it’s alive. And that smell remains, that faint metallic whiff of lyrium, twisted a little. Slightly off. Orianna can smell it as she throws open the narrow window, the steam from her bath rushing out into the afternoon air. The sky has been shattered but the town where she finds herself now grinds onward, staring every so often at the sky, their curtains closed to keep the light out. And all Orianna can do is wait. For word. For passage. For anything.

She towels herself off, twists the water from her hair back into the tub before braiding it tightly and pinning it up at the crown of her head. Catherina taught her how. Practical, really, to keep her hair from her eyes. The leather breeches are borrowed, the cotton tunic too. She tucks it into the hem, brushes her hands down the fabric as she straightens to look in the inn’s tarnished mirror. _Should probably get you out of those robes,_ the inn keep told her when she arrived nearly a week on now, the mercenaries she’d come with scattering as soon as they entered the village, the frightened young mage heading off back toward Haven. The old woman had a niece in the Circle. Made tranquil. _Don’t nobody need to know you’re here._ That’s always it. Kindness rooted in loss.

She’s waiting behind the worn wooden counter when Orianna comes down the narrow stairs. The tavern’s busier than it’s been since she arrived, and she feels a prick of urgency settle in her chest before she stuffs it quickly down. The inn keep nods to Orianna, silvery hair bound up at the nape of her neck, the creped skin of her shoulders bared by the threadworn ruffles of a long-worn dress. She settles on her elbows, gazes out the inn’s open door. Even in the daytime, the wound in the sky casts the whole world in green. Orianna doesn’t like looking at it, looks instead at the crowd in the tavern. She doesn’t see any templars, not in armor at least, but there’s a burly man in one corner dressed in the furs and leather of a Free Marcher, his eyes tinged in red. A sort of regal shiftiness about him that makes her sure he’s just recently fled the Order. She can almost smell the last desperate dregs of lyrium on him, wonders if he can feel her presence, wonders if he’ll do anything about it. Orianna turns her back to him. “Are any of the roads passable yet?”

“Not any of the main ones.” She’d got a jaunty accent, one that reminds her of the working folk back in Starkhaven. Familiar but hardly comforting. The old woman pushes off from the counter, straightens up to look at her. “And you don’t strike me a woodsman.” Orianna chuckles, turns her attention to the inn’s open windows, the air undulating blues and greens, so bright it’s near sun parched. “They call it the breach.”

Orianna looks back at the woman. “Who’s they?”

She just shrugs. “Everyone, I guess. The Chantry, I s’pose. What’s left of it.” She nods toward a man sitting near the far hearth. “Messenger came in this morning. Said the Divine is dead.” Orianna stifles a gasp, straightens up and tries to parse the sort of empty way the news makes her feel. A hope she hadn’t realized she’d been holding onto vanishing like smoke. The Divine. A woman she had feared and raged against and pleaded to in letter after letter in the months before the rebellion broke out. She had been everything and nothing, The seat of all her their hopes and somehow useless the same breath. But above all, she had seemed, somehow, immortal. And then the shock begins to spread, her brain ticking back to life. The conclave. All of the mages that had been there. _She_ had been there. Orianna bites back the panic rising up like bile inside of her. “Said the whole lot of ‘em is dead. What at that conclave over in Haven.”

Orianna digs her nails into the counter’s wood. She watches the messenger take a long pull of ale, settle heavy on the oak table. “Did he say where he was going?”

The old woman glances over at her. “West, I think.” Orianna pushes off from the counter, brushes past the old woman toward him.

She’d written the letter her first night at the inn. Used her last coin for scrap parchment and ink from a passing merchant and made do with the sewing needle she found between the floorboards in the closet where the inn keep put her up.

It’s barely coherent. A desperate, almost frantic scrawl. But she doesn’t have any more parchment, or coin, and all she needs is for it to be a flare. _I’m here. I’m alive. Come get me. Please._ She lays a hand softly on the heavy table, taps her nails on the wood to draw his attention. “Are you heading to Redcliffe.”

The messenger looks up from his cup, narrows his eyes to appraise her. “Not likely.”

“I don’t have coin. But I have a set of fur robes I have no use for now. Handmade. Pearl sewn in the sleeves.”

The messenger leans back in his chair, giving her a long once-over, stopping to look intently down at her hands. “What kind of fur?”

“Fennec”

He sniffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “Might be I could make my way close enough to drop it somewhere.”

She fishes the letter from the pocket of her breeches and lays it down before him. “Catherina Guillon. If you can find her.”

It felt like nothing to help the messenger tuck her robes into his saddlebags. Felt like nothing to watch him ride away. But here, now, in the narrow room where she’s been fitfully sleeping for days, she feels a stone inside herself, heavy in her gut. Orianna shuts the door, waits a beat, and then she starts to cry. That first taste of freedom, on horseback toward Redcliffe, had been so sweet. Like another life, like a dream. She can feel it slipping again from her fingers. The old world is dead. The new one too. She cries until her knees quake, until she slips to the ground, scattering sawdust in the low light. She holds her knees tightly to herself and cries until the sleep that has been so elusive finds her. A light touch, almost gentle.

She’s half-awake when she stumbles toward the source of the knocking, a waning evening light filtering through the room’s high, narrow window. Rubs sleep from her eyes as she opens the door. But the look on the old woman’s face jolts her fully awake. “Templars,” she hisses, face cast in shadow, “here. Looking for mages.” Every muscle in her body tensing at once. “There’s a window at the end of the hallway. It backs up to the forest.” The old woman glances behind her, hands trembling, and Orianna realizes that her fear is for herself as much as it for her. “ _Go._ ”

And she does. Running down the hall, slipping through the window to find the cold air of near night, the sky still aflame with the breach. She runs. Like a child; like a coward. Without a thought; without turning to fight.

She used to have dreams like this back in the Circle. Of running. Through the old-growth forest along Hercinia’s storm beaten coast, around the manor house she remembers only in pieces. Through the marbled streets of Starkhaven. Away. To nowhere. To just run. To just be able to. To stretch her legs and feel her body and not have to bend herself into the shapes the templars demanded. Make herself small, palatable. To not take the magic coursing through her and tamp it down, keep it quiet. To not flagellate herself for it on the altar of a god who has not spoken and who will never speak again. 

She can smell salt and earth and the distant smoke of flames. And the rising chill in the air feels like an omen. But she’s free. Still. Even if she feels nearly dead. And she lets herself feel grateful, lets herself try. But soon the salt slick air becomes snow and she wonders how far she’s run, how far she’ll have to run. The trees look nothing like the ones she left, the ground rocky now, sloping upward. Orianna stops, her breath billowing out in front of her, her thin tunic meager protection from the icy wind that comes whistling through the pines. A bird calls from a far branch. And then she realizes that it’s dark now. How she didn’t notice she has no idea, but the dense tree cover has blotted out the breach. The darkness pulses around her, rises, so dense she can’t see her own breath. So dark it’s like a reflection. The way all of Starkhaven reflected back at the circle, flames licking up the marble walls when it finally fell. She lifts her hand, curls a flame around her fingers, the quick pop of pain at her fingertips softening into a quiet burn. But the flame only deepens the darkness, makes the world feel so small, just where she just can see, a narrow line around her body. Her panic doesn’t bother, just spades itself under. She feels her way along the trees, one arm outstretched, wreathed in flame, the other curled around the chilled bark of the trees, ice now on her fingertips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	2. Chapter 2

The Herald is older than he. By a few years at least. And he feels often – as they stand across the old oaken table where that torn map of Thedas now looms – that she could best him in a fight. Perhaps not easily, no, but best him all the same. An ox of a woman. Nearly a head shorter than he but a body that belongs in armor. Her thickly corded muscle straining against the thin tunic Josie has put her in. She has fine features. Noble features, Josie might say. Has said. On more than one occasion when their discussions turn inevitably to diplomacy, Andraste preserve him as though they have time for that.

But he has noticed them. Noticed, as the candles burn low in the war room, the evening hours stretching long into night, that she may once have been very beautiful. Well-shaped lips. Delicate cheekbones. Eyes like a mage. That was what he noticed first. The pale color of her eyes. But what he noticed next, what he often finds his eyes drifting toward when she speaks, is the scar on her face. From the tip of her nose to her hairline. A deep scar, raised like bark on a tree. A wound that, he is sure, could easily have cloven her in two. And maybe that’s why Cullen feels at ease in her presence. The scars. They remind him of his own. Some nights, back in his quarters above the armory, the smell of hay and horses and hearth smoke all around, he’ll feel his way along them. As though he’s awoken to his own body for the first time, as though it became his again when he sloughed off the order’s armor. Deep gashes along one side of his ribs from the first demon he ever fought; a gnarled scar on the broadest muscle of his thigh from where a pike nearly took off his leg. His newest: a nick just above his lip where the tip of Meredith’s sword had come through his helmet. That scar frightens him the most. He wants to ask the Herald where she got hers. Ask her which ones make her feel closest to the abyss. “Commander.” He straightens, his armor clanking as he does, fingers curling around the hilt of his sword. Cassandra has her arms spread across near the whole of Thedas, hands curled into fists at either southern end. She raises an eyebrow. “You have no opinion?”

He glances around the room. The Herald is near the door, watching snow fall through the room’s narrow window. She runs a hand along the short crop of her dark hair. Her eyes, as they always do, flitting to Cassandra. Josie has settled heavily in one of the great, ornate chairs one Marquis or another insisted they have, Leliana lurking just over her shoulder. Cullen clears his throat. “I thought I’d made my opinion on the missing soldiers abundantly clear.”

Cassandra pushes herself off from the table. “ _We_ have been discussing the Storm Coast for the last half hour. Where have _you_ been?”

“Cassandra.” Leliana rounds the chair, approaches the table. That silent, unspoken thing passes between the Right hand and the Left.

Cassandra gives him a long, appraising look, then turns. “I’m taking a walk.” The heavy door whooshes behind her, the sound of it closing echoing in the room.

The Herald comes in out the shadows, glances across the map, then up at him. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a dreamer, Commander.” Not dreams, he wants to tell her, but he allows himself a chuckle, recedes a little into shadows of his own. The Herald points a gloved finger at the marker just along the Storm Coast. “Who are our allies here?” And then Josie is standing, chattering as her hands move quick like the wings of a bird. And he drifts back to his thoughts.

He remembers, quite clearly, the first time he learned of the Herald’s lineage. Remembers a sort of bottomless feeling he’d taken with him that night to bed. A simpering noble’s daughter. Now with the entire world on her shoulders. Doomed is perhaps the best way to put how he’d felt that night.

That had been before, of course, he’d watched the Herald cleave a wraith in two with her broadsword on the field only hours after she’d awoken. Her armor caked in blood, she’d come up through the throng of soldiers and complimented him on his formation. _A good choice,_ she’d nodded, beads of sweat rolling down her brow, _very good._

It’s hard to imagine her as a noble, even with his very limited understanding of what nobles do, of what their lives are like. It seems even out of place when Josie calls her _Lady Evelyn,_ like she’s rearranging in front of his eyes. Like he must have for her the first morning in the war room after her injuries began to finally heal when he told her that he used to be a templar. She’d raised both eyebrows, pursed her lips into a tight bud. _I wanted to become a templar,_ she told him when she found him later that day out with the troops, _a long time ago._ She hadn’t elaborated and he’d never asked, but he wonders often why she’d wanted to become one. Why she never did. “I should wonder, Commander.” He goes rigid at the sound of her voice. “Where you go off to, when you disappear behind your own eyes.” The war room comes back into focus. The candles have burned almost out, just pools of wax. And he is alone with the Herald. “Nowhere good I imagine. Not for a soldier.” She picks up one of Leliana’s pieces, runs her thumb along the dark wood of the raven’s beak. “Though I admit you often look quite peaceful.”

“Forgive me.” He kneads at the bridge of his nose. A sharp, familiar pain settling in behind his eyes. “These have been long days.”

“You didn’t miss anything interesting.” Cullen rounds the old oak table and the two of them fall in step down the long Chantry hall. He sees her eyes flit to the door to Cassandra’s quarters. Wonders if anything will ever come from _that._ “A favor,” She says as they approach the door, “if I may ask it.”

Cullen nods to the Chantry sister praying at the door, follows the Herald into the breach’s half night. A light snow is falling, their breath pluming out in front of them. “Of course, Herald.”

“A favor for my family.”

Cullen furrows his brow, sword hand tightening on the hilt. “I’d heard your relations were back safely in Hercinia. Or Ostwick.”

The Herald looks up at the breach. Her eyes are nearly its same color. She tightens her mouth into a thin line. “My youngest sister is in Starkhaven.”

“Ah.”

“In the Circle.” Cullen’s whole body tightens. “ _Was_ in the Circle I suppose now.”

He works to release his shoulders, the pain behind his temples sharpening. She rearranges again before his eyes. _I wanted to become a templar._ “I…I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

“No one knows.” She turns to look at him, the breach at her back. “Only Leliana. Which is how I know she was one of the Rebellion’s representatives at the Conclave.”

Cullen finds himself looking out over the bridge, the glittering sheet of ice beneath it, at the still smoldering ruins of the temple long in the distance. “My condolences. May the Maker carry her gentl-“

“Which is how I also know that she was sent away from the temple two days before the explosion. That she is likely still alive.” The light from the lantern upon the Chantry door casts deep shadows across the Herald’s face. Her scar looks livid in the light, painful. “I’d like to make sure.”

“I’m sure we could spare a few templars to-“

“Perhaps templars aren’t the best choice”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Templars are the _only_ choice. I’m not sending raw recruits into the wilderness.” _After a mage,_ he thinks but does not say.

She nods, looking back toward the sky. He follows her gaze. Cullen can’t find the moon, the breach the only orienting body left in the sky. An unnatural thing. He can feel the wrongness of it in the air. “Leliana received word that she was heading south of here. She doesn’t think my sister would have gotten very far. You would know more about that. Circle mages and their habits.”

Cullen isn’t sure if it’s meant to be as barbed as it sounds but his head has started to pound, the pain spreading across his cheeks, along his scalp. “With all due respect, Herald, I’m not sure I see the benefit of a mage rebel sheltering here with the Inquisition. Not with the sky as it is.”

Evelyn is quiet for a long time. Staring up at the breach, her arms crossed over her chest. The light of it reflects opaled across her skin, the raised bumps of her scar almost gruesome. She is so silent and so still that Cullen is sure he has overstepped some bound. He straightens, frowns, tries to mangle his way to an apology. She glances over at him, then again at the sky. Her voice is measured when she next speaks. “She was six when the templars took her. In my mind she still is. Small enough to carry in my arms. Small enough to ride atop my shoulders.”

“Herald, I-“

She turns to face him fully now, the lantern light flickering across her skin, gold to green as the breach warps it. “There would be no benefit to the Inquisition. Indeed, I imagine she could become an enormous liability. But she is my sister. And I have long wanted to right this wrong.”

Cullen purses his lips. Snow has begun to stick to the fur along his pauldrons, a chill bleeding in from his armor to his underclothes. “I imagine we could spare a small unit of soldiers to search along the roads leading to Haven, but I think you’d have better luck with one of Leliana’s agents. Or if you had her phylactery or…”

“No, nothing like that.” He watches her take a long breath, watches her eyes flutter briefly closed. “I imagine you are right. Even still.”

He has forgotten about the Herald’s favor by the time he leaves Haven a week later. The small retinue he sent in search of her wayward mage sister just another note in his every growing paperwork. He has forgotten, mostly, about the way his thoughts had drifted that night, about the almost primordial fear that had risen up inside of him. Mages outside the Circle. Mages without templars. He’s had other things to worry about in the interim. The Herald’s sudden return from Therinfal Redoubt, her news of the templars. The way the breach seems to be shifting in the sky. The way lyrium has carved out a hole inside of him that feels, with each passing day, full of the icy winds of his own memories. 

But as he and a few of his lieutenants settle on horseback down Haven’s southernmost road, he remembers. That lantern lit conversation. The way she had held her arms like a mother when she spoke of her sister, cradling. A softness he’d never seen on her. Cullen wonders if the Herald’s sister traveled along this road. Wonders if she died along it.

The village is too small to have more than a scrawl on the map, but it sits at a crossroad, a confluence of miles and miles of farmland. And it’s where Cullen’s come as a show of good faith as the Inquisition’s encampment begins to press at the boundaries of Haven, as the roads become clogged with merchants and soldiers and pilgrims. To offer some supplies, a few craftsmen. To shore up support. They can use all they can get. And he’s come here too with his lieutenants, in full armor and regalia, in the hopes that maybe some of the farm boys who have gathered here after the breach have a mind to pick up a sword.

He remembers watching the templars from the tall grass as a boy. Watching them shuck their armor, spar in the gentle clearing near his home. The way the sun glinted on their swords had seemed like a message from the Maker himself. Cullen’s head pounds, he tightens his grip on the reins. The village is so familiar he could walk it by heart. An inn, a cobbler, a blacksmith. Soft rolling hills in the distance, the thatched roofs of farmhouses dotting the horizon. It could be home. Cullen slips free from one of his gloves to knead at the bridge of his nose. This really _could_ be his home. Would he even recognize it now? Would it even recognize him? Probably not. Probably not any iteration of who he used to be, is now. He slows his horse outside the inn, bows his head to the old woman glowering from the doorway. The innkeep, he knows, from the way she’s widening her body like a bear at the mouth of its cave. “You look important.” Cullen dismounts, nods for his men to leave the supplies slotted for the inn at its doorstep. “Didn’t think the Inquisition would send their war hound down here in person.”

“Hardly a hound, milady. I just prefer to see things done right myself.” Which is true and isn’t true. His departure to the village had been something of a fight around the war table. The reasonable thing would have been to send an envoy in his place, but Haven has started to chafe. What with Chancellor Roderick breathing down his neck and Cassandra hounding him anytime he so much as touches his own temples. And with the templars coming. Days away still but ever present in his mind. Unsure if the return of the Order makes him feel comforted or worried. The ever-present pounding in his head making it hard for him to know if he’s feeling anything at all. “Why should we send our boys to die for the Chantry? It don’t seem to be doing much for us these days.” The woman’s old enough to be his mother, wrinkle-worn skin and graying hair. Stern enough to be his mother too, glowering up at him, arms crossed.

“Not for the Chantry,” he corrects before realizing what he’s just said. He rubs at his neck, glances over at the men unloading his supplies. “They’ll be housed, fed. Well trained.”

“Our boys are farmers.”

A light snow has begun to fall, dancing flurries in the air. Cullen’s breath steams in front of him. He tries to remember all the Fereldan winters he weathered as a boy, finds it hard to. “Well if any more of them would like not to be, you can send them to Haven. We will take care of them there.” The snow is cool on his skin, like the first morning draught of lyrium. His brain itches at the thought. He’s been burning up for days. “Ask about the blacksmith,” he calls to one of his men, “see if we have anything he is in need of.”

The storm starts as they leave. A chill comes whistling down off the mountainside, turning those soft swirling flakes into a wall of wind so white and cold it cows even the breach into hiding. They all brace themselves, leaning closer to the warm bodies of their horses. The cold only hastens Cullen’s headache, but it takes the edge off the hot flashes. More and more frequent as of late. He remembers the ex-templars he’d pass by in Kirkwall, slumped in dusty corners, their brows slick with sweat, fingers twitching as if grasping and Cullen tightens his grip on the reins, tries to banish the thought. Tries so hard that when the soldier as his side cries out he, at first, doesn’t notice. But the cries continue, and he turns to see, in horror, the soldier’s horse spook, go running off the road into the blinding white of the storm. Without a thought, he turns his own horse, calls back to his men to go on, and heads off into the storm after the soldier.

He follows the tracks to the base of the foothills. Finds the horse but not its rider and ties both horses to a low hanging pine, its boughs some shelter from the storm, then starts on foot up toward where the tracks taper off. Cullen braces himself against the wind, takes a long breath, then says a quiet prayer to the Maker. Leliana thinks this is his weakest quality. Can hear her voice now. _All this for one man?_

He thinks, at first, that she’s an animal. A flash of dark fur that he realizes, in inches, is braided, that he follows up to find a woman. Curled in on herself, slotted between the heavy roots of a tree and its low hanging boughs. And then, when she turns slowly to look at him, eyes heavy, skin chapped pink from the wind, he recognizes her. The family resemblance unmistakable even if she is slight as an elf, the skin of her face unmarred. They are worlds apart, but he sees the Herald in this woman clear as day. And realizes, with a sudden bolt of terror, that means she must be a mage. Silence hangs between them, his breath wide and steamed, hers barely there at all.

He spent the whole passage between the Free Marches and Fereldan sick over the side of the boat. Seasick, dope sick. Cassandra at his side, stoic as ever. _I don’t want to cause any more harm,_ he’d told her, _I want my vows to mean something._

“My lady. My lady Trevelyan.” She looks at him as though he’s struck her across the face. And he knows now that she is not a figment of the storm, knows now that she is who he had believed her to be, a mage for certain. And he wavers. Alone here in the storm with a mage who looks, like maybe no other mage has before, like she would kill him if she could. But he knows that she cannot, can feel the emptiness inside her. There’s nothing left for her to pull from, no way for her to hurt him. And he can see it too. The way she’s curled around herself. A blue tinge on her lips, the lips of her fingers. He crouches down and closer he can see that the rage in her eyes is also fear. Her chest quivers like a trapped rabbit. And he feels himself in Kinloch, in Kirkwall. There was safety in violence, in power. They always taught him that, didn’t they? Meredith most of all. _We should fear them. All of them._ Her thin tunic is stuck to her skin, clumped with ice. She wears nothing over it. Cullen can smell the lingering scent of floral oil about her hair, laying near frozen against a root of the tree. He can’t remember the last time he was this close to a mage. At a harrowing perhaps. No, he remembers now. The last mage they made tranquil in Kirkwall. He’d held her arms. The pain behind his eyes sharpens. Cullen shifts onto his knees. The girl is watching him, unmoving, eyes wide. He removes the fur from his pauldrons, drapes it over her. “Storms like these don’t last long. If we make it til morning, we can find our way back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	3. Chapter 3

She watches the dawn break with a templar at her side and she does not kill him. At first because she cannot, an emptiness inside of her that makes her feel like a cracked, hollow vessel. And then because she cannot bring herself. For all that talk at the conclave, of becoming an apostate, a real one, her fear is overwhelming. It all feels like slipping back into a well-worn groove. Almost compelled, she is, to fall in line with him, to look to him for guidance. The way these old clothes fit breaks her heart.

The cold has made her body stiff, made it hard to talk, jaw locked. She has nothing to say to him anyway. Nothing that will keep her alive. And that is all she cares about now, an almost animal terror simmering inside of her. She’d spent all night dreaming of the fennec cloak she sent off with the messenger, fingers carding through its phantom warmth. She’d thought the templar at first a hallucination, some figment of her fearful mind. Fitting, of course, that they would haunt her even in the last moments of her life. But when he’d climbed up onto the outcropping, his skin windwhipped and chapped, she’d known. Alive and real. Terrifying.

She hadn’t the strength to run her fingers through the fur he wrapped her in. Limbs so worked over by the snow that they felt no longer part of her, as heavy and useless as all the things she left when she fled. They still do. The templar shifts where he’s sat, his body too big for the nook she’s found shelter from the storm in. The thick, gnarled roots crowd his shoulders and she wonders, as she has always wondered about templars, how much of him is armor and how much of him is man. Orianna averts her eyes from him, suddenly aware that she’s been staring, looks out anywhere but at him.

The sky is a single sheet of grey, parting only when it skims the edge of the breach, churning around it. That hole in the sky so much colder than the sun, even if it’s brighter, the rays unnatural on her skin. The fur he has wrapped around her smells like musk, sweat. A maleness that she could sense even if she couldn’t see the bulk of his armor. A mountain of a man, really, tightly coiled. Her eyes fix to the weight of his sword, thoughts only on the strength it must take to wield it. He could break her in two, shatter her like glass.

But he doesn’t. Instead he rises to his feet with a groan, brushes some caked snow from his pauldrons. It’s just flakes now, a light dusting falling from the broken sky. That horrible wind died down with the darkness. But the cold has sharpened in the air. She can feel it only in the corners of her mouth, the rest of her feels nothing. “The weather may turn again as the day wears on.” A good Fereldan boy then, his accent unmistakable, though the flaxen hair and thick set of his jaw had made her assume as much. “We should try to make our way down the mountain.” He turns back to look at her, mouth set in a hard line. Orianna can see the way every muscle in his body is pulled taut. Somehow more prey than predator and she wonders if he knows there’s nothing left of her to fight with. Has always wondered that, if the templars could feel mages the way mages could always feel them. “Can you walk?” Her eyes flit up to his face. Standing now, she can take in the whole breadth of him. Tall and broad, his armor glinting in the pale light, almost too bright as the snow reflects off it. Orianna feels fused to the tree, her legs curled like a doe’s under her body. “I can carry you,” he says, quietly like it’s mostly to himself, an assurance. He crouches, eyes on hers, reaching slowly like he’s trying to coax an animal from its hole. The first touch makes her whole body recoil. She’d promised herself, that first night in Redcliffe, bedrolls packed so tightly together in the tavern she could feel the breath of the mage beside her, that she’d never let a templar touch her again, never feel the inhuman chill of their armor on her skin again. But his hand is sheathed in a glove. Soft leather. She lets him lift her from the ground, brings her arms slowly around his neck. 

The Trevelyans are hunters. _Were_ hunters. Back when the Free Marches was just a brutal expanse of rocky coastline, dense pine forest. Before the Chantry, long before the Circles. _Our lineage goes back to the time of Andraste._ Someone had told her that once. From across a wide banquet table. Fragments of memory now. A life splintered by templars, kept barely intact inside the walls of the Circle. A whole world that she can only now remember in the cool feeling of stone under feet, whispers in dark corridors, the sick sweet smell of honeyed candles burning to the wick. Faces blurred. In her small memory, just the glitter of rings on clasped hands. Hunters. Trackers. Wolves. Right at the center of the Trevelyan crest, their pelts lining the walls of the keep. A story, so faint it’s almost a dream, of pet wolves, leashed to old barbarian thrones. The fur lining the tiny cloak she wore when the templars took her had been a wolf’s. She’d kept it locked away in the trunk at the end of her bed. Ash now, surely, in the fire that took the Circle. Orianna can hear wolves in the distance, their voices catching on the howling wind. Closer now than they had been before. Fitting, maybe, to be eaten by a wolf. Consumed by the family crest. Her father would be livid to hear it, jealous probably, if the man she remembers in the man he still is.

The templar shifts. She’s on his back now, arms around his neck, his gloved hands under her thighs. The wind has started again, the snow heavier now. She has no idea how long they’ve been walking, which direction they’ve head. But she can feel his weariness, the strain in his arms as he holds her up. And she can see that, despite the cold, despite the storm, a thin sheen of sweat shines on his brow. She fights a sudden urge to wipe it from him, scolding herself. He’s a templar. Even if she hasn’t yet seen him take his morning lyrium draught, even if he hasn’t yet spoken on her magic. He could be taking her anywhere. Could kill her at the town’s edge. As would be his Chantry-given right. An apostate now, stripped of even the meager protection the Chantry afforded her. But she’s weary and he is, despite everything, familiar. From the way he holds himself to the quiet whispered prayer she can hear under this breath. Her head falls heavily onto his back. The chill of the armor sharp against her skin, the warmth of him where she’s wrapped her fingers around his neck. She can feel his heartbeat there. Strong and steady and the comfort she feels is animal, something more at home on those wave-beaten shores of the old stories than here in the harsh light of their world now. She can smell lyrium on his skin, but just faintly, fading. Overpowered by leather, the musk of his furs. Hair oil too. Just a whiff. It nearly makes her laugh. Such a silly thing, frivolous thing. She loses her grip on his mantel, feels him tighten his hold around her thighs. He says something she can’t hear over the wind. There’s a darkness in the corners of her eyes. It washes clean over her.

She awakens to the howl of the wind, to snowflakes the size of her fingertips drifting past. She’d dreamt a meandering dream of babbling aqueducts and the gnarled, shivering boughs of trees; the stony recitation of the canticles and the shimmering dust in her room at the inn. The hollow feeling inside of her has only grown, harsher now, like pieces of her are chipping steadily away. Orianna closes her eyes to shield them from the sting of the wind.

Her templar is still holding tightly on. “You’re awake.” His voice is muted, weary too.

Her own comes out cracked, thin. “Where are we?”

“Nearly to town.” She exhales, whole body releasing. He tightens his grip, Orianna tightens her own. “Try to stay awake,” he says and when she doesn’t respond, he jostles her.

And that movement, the clang of his swords against his armor fills her with such a heavy dread that her stomach churns, chest tightening. “Why haven’t you killed me?” She doesn’t know where it comes from, perhaps from the very depths of her. Orianna feels him tense. “I’m an apostate. Why haven’t you killed me?” He bends to the force of the wind, tightening his grip. If he replies, she can’t hear it over the howl.

When she wakes again, the storm has passed. The sky clear, deep banks of snow sloping along the road. She can feel, beneath her, the loping rhythm of horseback. She is still pressed to his back, still wrapped in the soft furs of his cloak. Beside them, another horse, riderless, secured to the templar’s saddle with a rope. He’s so warm. Like a hearth. She’s never touched a man so warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	4. Chapter 4

“Is she well?” Cullen isn’t sure why he’s asking. Feels strange doing it, rushing after the Herald as she crosses the training grounds toward the Chantry. But it’s been a full day since they arrived back at the gates of Haven, wind-swhipped and exhausted, and he’s seen nothing of the mage, heard nothing of her. Old templar instinct perhaps, to have a detailed cartography of the mages in his midst. Greagoir taught him that, or maybe Meredith. His headaches have been splitting lately and sometimes the two blend unnervingly together.

The Herald slows, the two of them stopping just inside the shadow of the main gate. She’s slick with sweat, breath labored, the musky scent of hard training still lingering about her. “The healers say she will live. But had you not found her when you did, she would have likely perished.”

Cullen curls his fingers around the ball of his hilt, a habit so engrained now that it barely registers. One he’d picked up after Kinloch. It’s chilled against his palm, even through the leather of his gloves. The afternoons have become more like evenings since the breach. The waning sun casting a half-light over the valley that makes time feel immaterial, that makes Cullen feel like he is chasing a night that never comes. He had, at first, found the perpetual twilight beautiful. Now he just finds it tiring. Like he’s beginning to find this conversation tiring, a pounding settling in at his temples. “I did my best to keep her safe.”

The Herald removes her gauntlets to run a hand through her closely-cropped hair, her skin flushed, breathing still a little labored. She’d spared with the Iron Bull for most of the afternoon. Cullen had fielded breathless rumors among his men in the weeks before that the Herald was a reaver. _Ridiculous,_ he’d told them, _the nobility don’t allow their own to take the blood._ But as he watched her fight, ruthless, punishing, he’d begun to wonder himself. “At the cost of your lieutenant, I heard.”

Cullen blinks at her, pulled back from his thoughts. He found his lieutenant frozen nearly solid to the earth just beyond where Cullen tied to the horses. With the mage on his back and the wind blowing the trees nearly to bent, he’d had no choice but to leave him. “He’d perished before I could reach him.” Cullen glances down at his troops. They’re weary. He can tell. Weary even before the fight, any fight. “I intend to send a small contingent to retrieve the body. So he can be laid to rest as the Maker intended.”

“Of course.” The Herald rolls her shoulders, her armor clanking with the movement. She looks up toward the inn, then back at him, her eyes, almost unnervingly, the same color as the breach. “Thank you.” She reaches out, lays her hand on his pauldron, “For bringing her back. I know how you feel about mages.”

Cullen opens his mouth. To retort, to deny. _I feel no such way about mages._ But the Herald has already started up the snow-dusted stairs away from him. He sees Varric look up from his letter writing as the Herald approaches, the light of his bonfire casting long shadows over his face. Cullen turns away, looks back down toward his men. They look small from this vantage. And young. And afraid. Cullen feels small too, standing in the shadow of the breach. But war-worn, too empty to be afraid.

Leliana’s tent is barely big enough for her, much less the both of them. Cullen has to incline his head lest he bang it against the wooden supports. Leliana nods curtly at him when he pushes past the flaps, handing off a parcel to one of her spies, before the young elf ducks past Cullen out of the tent. “How unexpected.” Things have been tense between them. Since the templars. Since their words had nearly come to blows over their subjugation to the Inquisition. But she seems to be in a fair mood now. And Cullen has settled as well.

“I’m looking for some information.”

“How unlike you.” Leliana grins from under her hood.

Cullen rubs at his neck, can feel the heat of his flush across his cheeks. He has never been able to school that last remnant of boyishness from himself, a thought that only serves to deepen his blush. “There were libraries in Circles, you know. I am relatively well-read.”

“Forgive me, Commander.” Leliana comes around her desk, her mail clinking at the movement. “You are just so very easy to fluster.” A shout echoes outside the tent. The quartermaster. Sparring again with one soldier or another. Cullen makes a mental note to speak to her, _again,_ about keeping her politics to herself. “What is it you’re looking for?”

Cullen clears his throat, hand drifting to the hilt of his sword before he pulls it back, straightens. “The Lady Trevelyan’s Circle record. I would be hard pressed to imagine that you haven’t secured a copy for the Inquisition.”

Cullen watches Leliana pause, can feel the air in the tent snap, full again with tension. “And what use would you have with that?”

Cullen steadies himself, her response not unexpected. “We have a rebel mage in our midst. I would like to at least have some information about her.”

“She is far from the only mage in Haven.”

“No, but the others have pledged their loyalty to the Inquisition. The others came here to escape the Rebellion. As I understand it, her loyalties very much still lay with the rebel mages in Redcliffe.”

Leliana looks so long at him it feels as though her gaze has gone straight through, stripped him of his armor. “And what do you intend to do with the information you find there?”

“I intend to soothe my fears.” And it’s more honest than he intends to be. Had meant it only flippantly, had not meant it to cut himself to the bone as it does. And Leliana must feel that because she says nothing, just hums quietly, before turning her back to him, bent to rummage through her papers.

Her name is Orianna. Which he’d known, heard in passing from the Herald. But to see it written gives him a strange feeling. Like carrying the mage on his back through the storm had been but a fevered dream. The name, written on parchment, makes it real. Orianna Marietta Dalfina Trevelyan. The flourish in her name an homage, he assumes, to her Orlesian mother. The second daughter of four. No sons. Born 9.15 Dragon. Only a few years younger than he.

Cullen stretches his arms over his head, tries to work out a kink at the base of his neck. He’s in only his breaches and undershirt, but even with the cool night air coming in through the thatched windows of his meager quarters above the barracks, he feels as though he is burning. Sweat pooling at his clavicle, the small of his back. The headache, at least, is gone now, though he’s still kept the room dark, the only light the soft flickering of a lone candle on his narrow desk. The room smells like sawdust, like hay. Which is comforting in that it is almost wholly unfamiliar. Only the faintest shape of himself as a child emerges, hiding amongst the hay with his sister. A memory he can easily discard, one that doesn’t trouble him. Much less easily than he can discard this, or the memory of the mage clinging to him, or the breach. Cullen takes a short sip of wine, works his teeth along a stale heel of bread. His stomach has start to roil in the nighttimes as of late. Like the most animal parts of him, in realization that he will not sate their thirst for lyrium, begin to riot with the waning light. He has not spoken to a healer about it, is not sure if he ever will. Cullen takes another sip of wine, turns his attention back to the document.

It’s standard really. Not unlike the hundreds, maybe thousands, of records he’s gone through in his time with the Order. He sorted through them for hours in the months after Kinloch fell. When Greagoir still didn’t trust him with a sword, would only give him clerical work. No, it’s hardly different at all. And he feels foolish to have expected otherwise, for having expected some divine sign. From the Maker maybe. About whether or not he should yield to the Herald’s insistence that she be allowed to remain in Haven. It’s not his decision, he knows that. Not with Leliana on the side of the Herald and Cassandra trying to keep the templars in check as they begin to arrive in droves at Haven. A tinder box, even without the hole in the sky. So perhaps then this examination is simply for him, to do exactly what he told Leliana it would: soothe some of his fear.

It’s a little longer than the average, her noble birth necessitating a few pages of notes on her lineage at the fore. And the Trevelyans drafted an official document to the Chantry which has been included, denying any magic in their bloodline, calling their second eldest an aberration in their line. Hurtful, he thinks, though he doubts Orianna would have ever seen it. And not all that unusual among nobility, even if this one seems particularly harsh. She was transported to the Circle as a babe of six. Young for magic but hardly unheard of. Underwent her harrowing at the expected time, passed with no additional notes from any of the templars present. Nothing at all of note until the most recent years when the documents note a slew of disciplinary actions taken against her. That doesn’t surprise him either. Cullen can remember in minute, searing detail the change in even the air around Kirkwall when the fringe mages began to agitate. He imagines it was not so different at Starkhaven’s Circle. Wonders if she was an agitator or just one of the mages whipped up in the fray. But regardless, she is a highly skilled mage, that much is clear. Which does soothe him some. That will he not, at very least, have to put the Herald’s sister down as an abomination. Cullen breaks off a piece of his bread, lets it soften in his mouth, his stomach lurching, the room still hot as a hearth.

He’s heading to the trebuchets because he cannot sleep. And the sleeping draughts make him groggy, slow to wake. Which he cannot be now. Which he has never been allowed to be but especially not now. So he sticks instead to the quiet rhythm of donning each piece of his armor, lets that soothe him, lets that clear his head, hopes that examining the trebuchets again will soothe him. 

Tonight, the snow is gentle and sparse, the air clear, the torches crackling as he passes. The fear that had so gripped Haven, for now, feels subdued, suspended in the quiet. It makes him linger longer than he would on another night, watch as the flakes drift from the mountainside onto the thatched rooftops. Most of the town is quiet, dark. But the apothecary hut is still lit like a Chantry and Cullen finds himself drawn toward it. Finds himself slipping inside with hardly a thought.

The air inside the apothecary is dense with smoke, with the sharp smell of herbs tinged with char. And the mage is where he left her, on her back in the far cot of the hut. Though her skin has more color than when he left her, more color by far. And Cullen himself, strangely, wildly, relieved. To see her there. Drawing breath. Looking, at least a little, at peace. The candlelight reflecting on the fine bones of her face. He finds himself drawn. All the potential for beauty in her sister has bloomed on her face and just the thought itself is enough to make Cullen’s temples throb. Humiliating and dangerous and wholly inappropriate. And familiar too. Of another mage, in another time. When he had been another man. “You gonna let her wake up before you execute her or break her brain or whatever it is templars do to runaway mages?”

Cullen turns, thunderstruck, to find Adan in the corner by the door. His eyes are narrowed, arms crossed over his chest. Cullen rests his palm against the hilt of his sword. “We have no intention...” He clears his throat. “The Lady Trevelyan is safe here. She has not been charged with any crime.”

“When has that ever stopped the lot of you?” Cullen’s temples throb, even the meager light of the apothecary’s lanterns suddenly too bright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading <3


	5. Chapter 5

Orianna knows the face because it is her own. Because it’s a dream she’s had a hundred times. Her own self across the room, distorted, different. A version that is almost, but not quite. She’d been afraid, when she was young, that the dream was a demon. _Just a nightmare,_ her First Enchanter told her, _sometimes those are more fearsome that demons._ And they had been, for years. Versions of herself with many eyes trailing down her cheeks, with no limbs. One, that recurred so often in those last years in the circle, all nude, legs splayed, hand trailing between them. A place she herself never dared go, not with the templars just beyond, not with the whispered stories of a mage caught like that.

But she’s never looked quite like this. Older by many years, soft wrinkles beside her eyes. Like she’s smiled a lot in her life, fanciful really that she’s managed to grow old at all. And this version of herself is broad. Tripled. Tightly coiled muscle that strains the seams of the tunic she’s wearing. Her face shorn in two from the temple across to other side of her chin with a deep scar, knotted and whirled like the bark of a tree. Fearsome. In all the ways Orianna would like to be. Wish fulfillment maybe, this dream. Being born a warrior and not a mage. _No_ , she scolds herself, Catherina’s loud, clear voice now layering over her own, _none of that, not anymore of that shame._

This other self shifts, rolling her neck, seemingly now aware that Orianna is watching. A chill races up her. Because this never happens in the dream. She always just watches, glides along the peripheries as her not-self fills all the space she could never go. So she must be in the fade, must be, maybe, dead. She tries to sort through what she remembers. That sharp wind. A warm heartbeat of a man pulsing against the pads of her fingers, the sticky chill of his armor. _Armor._ Of course. The templar. Death then. Maybe at the edge of the village. It’s hard to remember, but she has no doubt that he would have killed her, rid himself of the apostate on his back. Funny, that death should look so much like a thatched cottage, that it should feel like a straw mattress. Her reflection is standing now, moving with a fluid, muscular grace across the room. Her hair is cropped closely to her head and Orianna wonders if this is a demon then, comes to tempt her before she crosses into eternity. Because she would never cut her hair short. The templars had done it once. As a punishment. It had been so brightly humiliating that even thinking of it now makes her feel small and numb and terrified. The way she’d sat shivering as they shore it off. At least she had those months, back in Redcliffe, where she had belonged to no one but herself. Not the Chantry, not the Order. Where her time was her own. Even the air had a different feeling. Wider, freer, than the dense, claustrophobic air of the Circle. A thousand templars breathing down her neck, the feeling gone in the Fereldan sunshine. Her reflection settles down beside the bed, eyes soft, mouth twitching up. “My sister.” And the voice is not her own. The air shifts. Orianna can almost smell the ocean, feel the wet chill of the stone against her bare feet. She can hear nothing. Only the relentless pounding of her own heart. She opens her mouth and screams. 

They spare the shackles but Orianna knows that means nothing. Not by the way they led her roughly through the town, heads poking into the doorways of thatched roofs to watch her pass. Haven again. If Orianna wasn’t so weary, she might have laughed.

And maybe laughter wouldn’t be wholly inappropriate, cornered as she is in this narrow stone room, the chill of a stiff chair against her skin. She wonders who sat here before her, for what purpose. Spies a dark stain at the base of the chair. Not entirely a surprise. It is, she supposes, an Inquisition, after all. One that seems to have her own blood at its head. More shocking really than even the breach, to find her here. Her sister hanging back by the door now, the meager light casting lazy shadows over her armor. Evelyn. Eldest girl. The one Orianna remembers best, even if still only in fragment. A wonder she’s not married off, body straining under the weight of a brood of her own. Perhaps they are cursed, just as her father said as the templars led her away, his voice echoing into the night, cursed to the root. Orianna shifts, her limbs still stiff from her night in the cold, sleep still hanging heavily over her. The light streaming in through the room’s single, high window loses its warmth by the time it reaches her, arcs into shadow at her feet.

The room looks like some kind of garrison, though she hardly knows what that word means. Everything she knows of war and soldiers comes only from the fanciful books she read in the Circle, the hushed whispers back in Redcliffe. And they are at war, she assumes, judging by the great many templars she saw on her way here, by the towering trebuchets out by the gates. By the seeker fuming in front of her now, armor tarnished and dented like she’s just come in off a fight.

Orianna has only seen a seeker one other time in her life, but it seared so clearly in her memory that she recognized immediately the insignia on the woman’s armor. Had to bite back the terror that roiled up through her. But she’s numbed it now, spaded that fear under and sits rigid as the seeker paces like an animal in front of her. “Are you a spy?” Her accent is one that Orianna does not recognize and it lets her hold her head up higher, push the fear down even further. If the woman had a Marcher accent, she might have fainted. “Hmm? Why should we not assume that you are allied with the rebel mages?”

Orianna curls her fingers over the ends of the chair’s arms. They feel stiff, numb. “I _am_ allied with them.”

The seeker scoffs. She is a flurry of movement, a force of nature. And Orianna still feels hollow, carved out from the inside. Not a drop of magic. Nothing, she feels with increasing force, to defend herself with. “Tell me your intentions here. Tell me why we should trust you.”

Orianna manages a scoff. “Intentions? I don’t even know how I came to be here! I have no interest in whatever this is! I have no interest in Haven at all! Not now that the Divine is dead. I came only as a representation of the mage rebellion to oversee talks between-”

“Liar!” Her voice echoes across the stone. Orianna shrinks away from her, the chair digging into her skin as she clings either tighter to it. But she won’t let this seeker see her fear, holds her head even higher, juts her chin out. “You expect me to believe you left the Conclave when you did all by chance?”

“Cassandra.” Her sister steps out of the shadows, her armor clinking as she takes the short steps down to where they are. “This isn’t an interrogation She isn’t a prisoner. There’s no evidence of her involvement with the breach. You know that.” Orianna watches the two women regard each other, watches something pass silently between them. Cassandra sighs, shoulders heavy, and Orianna feels a sudden pinprick of pity. She tucks it quickly away. Evelyn lays an armored hand on the seeker’s shoulder. “Do what you must to assure yourself and then let this be done.”

“How are we to allow her to remain here when we have no idea of her intentions? The Inquisition cannot withstand anymore outside scrutiny.”

“I have no wish to remain here.” Both women turn at the sound of her voice, as though they’d forgotten about her. “I would be returned to Redcliffe.”

“It’s not possible. The roads are blocked. The breach has sent both Fereldan and Orlais into chaos.” Evelyn crosses the simple distance between them, shucking one gauntlet to free her hand. “I promise you Orianna,” she reaches out as if to stroke her hair, her cheek, “that no harm will come-“

“Don’t touch me.” The hiss in her voice echoes. She recoils and, to her surprise, Evelyn flinches away too. “No one touches me. _No one._ ” She’s trembling now and it only makes her voiceall the more venomous. “Not even you.” There’s a pleading look in Evelyn’s eyes, a wounded look. But it is brief. Like she too has learned to school herself away.

“So they didn’t kill you then.” Adan takes a long pull of liquor, his face cast in darkness, save for the hollows of both his eyes. They glitter in the light of the apothecary’s hearth, the air so thick with smoke it’s like a fog.

Orianna presses the door closed behind her, her back to the wood, the bustling sounds of Haven muted beyond it. She’s to be moved to a room in the Chantry, the news delivered as a clear order. She’s to retrieve her things from the apothecary hut, to _make herself at home in the Chantry._ “Not yet.”

The alchemist has a bitter laugh that makes Orianna wonder if he ended up here much the same as she did. “Not yet, indeed.” He takes another nip of liquor, sways a little as he heads toward the hearth where elfroot and spindleweed have been left to dry out on the stones, their almost murky scent wafting through the air. “Do you think they will?”

Someone just outside the door shouts. Beyond that, she can hear the thud of casks being rolled off a cart, the ground trembling at their weight, kicking up dust. Horses whinnying, the clink of armor. There’s an almost cryptic quiet in the shack, like the thick smoke air has muffled all else. “The whole of the Templar Order is here. I’m sure they’ll find a way.”

With the flames of the hearth at his back, Adan looks even more drawn. She can see clearly the weight of something over him and she wonders if he will tell her now something she cannot bear to hear. A story of templars and tranquils and suffering. Like the inn keep. But instead he takes another long pull of liquor. A chilly wind slips in through the cracks of the hut, scattering the smoke. “Would you like a way out?”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You shouldn’t.” The bottle clatters when he sets it roughly down on the edge of the hearth. “But what choice do you have?”

Orianna curls one hand into a fist, the half-moons of her nails digging into her palm. Well-worn grooves. She did just this so often in the Circle. To keep herself quiet, keep her temper in check. She has scars on this palm. Just faint. Another on the opposite palm. That one much deeper from where they took her blood for the phylactery. Fraternal twins, her hands. She digs her nails in harder.

It’s a pilgrimage path. Hardly ever used, Adan told her, not even by the most devout. Grown over now with weeds, crowded with untouched drifts of snow. Iced over surely. Slick, unforgiving. It leads up the mountain away from Haven. Where exactly it goes, Adan hadn’t been sure. Just that it’s never patrolled, just that it leads away. Orianna can still taste the storm on her tongue when she leaves the apothecary, can feel the cold almost to her bones. She’d never felt a pain like that, curled in the hollow of that tree. The cold sharp as a blade. The bed they’ll give her in the Chantry is sure to be warm. Soft like the tunic and breaches they’ve given her to wear. The bed in the Circle was warm too, her robes soft and elegantly made. Orianna bows her head to slip the fur-lined hood of her cloak over it. She looks up at the mountain range towering overhead, at the snow churning beyond the breach.

She waits until the darkest part of the night before she slips out the narrow window in her Chantry room. She can hear the quiet shuffle of the guard just outside her door, the quiet chanting of a Chantry sister. Orianna laid awake for a long time. Thinking, fretting. She’d thought to slip into the kitchen, to bring some manner of provision with her but the rhythmic clank of armor had left her rigid with fear. The same fear that has her slipping through the window. Perhaps she will die upon that mountain. Frozen solid until the spring thaw. Devoured by wolves. It doesn’t matter now, even as she gasps when her palm comes to rest on the cold stone. The ice is painful. Her whole body recoils from it. But her fear is still there, blooming into rage. It’s no choice at all.

She pulls herself up onto it with some effort, perching on the rounded edge to try and catch her breath. The mountain has begun to loom, her breath billowing out in front of her. She holds her body rigid so that it will stop trembling. From the cold or from fear she cannot be certain. “Going somewhere?” Orianna nearly falls from the wall, reaches up to stifle a scream with her own fist. She turns to find the source of the voice. Down, at the base of the wall, a dwarf stands peering up at her. His gingery hair slick back off his face, the buttons of his shirt undone to reveal his chest despite the cold. “Come on, kid, get down from there. Let’s have a drink.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 
> 
> If you want, come find me on my [tumblr](https://junkbabelna.tumblr.com/) :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this is me just being really indulgent with myself about Cullen’s interior world. I promise this fic is not just a character study lol, things will eventually happen. 
> 
> Also forgive the worse than usual editing. It's been a long week in a series of long weeks in a long ass fucking year.

He is sweating through his armor. So many days without a proper bath, so many days bent now as he is, prostrated before a wide wall of magic, before a Maker that feels further and further away with each whispered prayer. His voice breaking, lips cracked, tongue huge and unwieldy in his mouth. Sticky and filthy and overheating. His tunic is soaked through, the mail pressing against it so heavy now, like armor meant for a bigger man, a stronger man. The places where the metal touches his bare skin burn, a bright jolting pain that feels too primordial to be magic. Stemming surely from the heat that is pouring from his body. Feverish as though he’s taken ill. Cullen can feel each bead of sweat as it rolls down his face 

He’d taken his first draught of lyrium only three years before, just a day after his sixteenth birthday, and he isn’t sure how many days it’s been but he can feel now the hole its carved inside of him at its absence. His mouth is too dry to beg. And it should not matter. He is not a little boy. He will not beg a demon; he will not shed a tear. He is not a little boy. He is a grown man, a few weeks past nineteen. He is a templar. A warrior. Cullen leans heavily on the hilt of his sword, trying to take some of the pressure from his shoulders, his knees. He wants to strip down, the armor he’s been wearing for days heavy and hot, but he remains where he kneels, lets it press down on him

He is tired. He is weary. He is afraid. So makerdamned afraid that his armor clinks as he trembles, too worn out now to tense his muscles into stillness. He shakes like a babe, like a maiden. Cullen lets his eyes close, fights back the fear that rushes up inside of him in the darkness, and begins to pray. _Maker, my enemies are abundant._ His voice comes hoarse, low against the hum of the magic all around him. _Many are those who rise up against me._ It hurts his throat, to speak, raw now, parched. _But my faith sustains me; I shall not fear the legion._ His lips are cracked, the bottom splayed like tributaries, cracks in dried mud. _Should they set themselves against me._ The salt of his own blood ignites his hunger, stomach twisting and empty. _In the long hours of the night._ How long did he sit in waning candle light to memorize this verse? First canticle of Trails. So dull. So very dull. _When hope has abandoned me._ He’d watched the shadow of the flames lick up those stone walls, the near insect droning of his fellow recruits kneeled down against the stone. _I will see the stars and know._ He longs for it. The quiet safety of that room when magic was but an academic thing. A thing to think long about but never worry. When his days were spent training and reading and chanting in the faraway cloister of men only like him. _Your Light remains._ There are no stars here in the belly of the Circle. Cullen opens his eyes, his fingers tightening over the crossguard of his sword. It is the same as it was when he closed his eyes. His thoughts drift in all directions. Away from here. Anywhere away from here, the tight feeling in his chest growing so intensely that he is sure he will make himself sick on the stones beneath him. His mind reaches backward. Shoulder to shoulder in the mess to break fast. His eyelids drooping in the far corner of the library as the fire crackled to embers. Amell always stayed late, poured over a book. He’d only once gathered enough meager courage to ask her what she was reading, too flustered to hear her sly reply. There was a softness about her he’d yearned for, yearned to hold close to him. An animal comfort. It’s wrong. It has always been wrong to feel as he did, feel as he does now at his weakest moment. To intermingle, the even entertain the idea of it. Against the Maker, the Order.

_Amell._ Maker, why on earth should she come to him now? The magic of the barrier pulses around him, his heart pounding so loud in his ears that he is sure it will topple him. In his mind’s eye he can see her as she was in the Circle. She turns to look at him, that wall of magic distorting her features, making them shiver until she’s nearly unrecognizable. She says something that he cannot hear but that sends heat straight down to base of his belly, a humiliating warmth that drives up inside of him. A desire he cannot control, barely wants to. She opens her mouth. Her teeth sharpen into points.

Cullen wakes gulping for air. His brow slick with sweat, hands grasping at the stuff linen under him. It takes him too long to get his bearings, too long to calm his breathing. The room is dark. Candles cold. He’d forgotten to snuff them out before he’d fallen asleep, wax hardened dripping over the edge of his table. He feels a brief flare of panic at being so careless, laying back on his cot, one arm over his eyes. He takes a long breath, one hand just below his sternum as if to guide the air into his body, to try and release the fear that has so tight a grip around him.

He should have better control than this. Nearly two decades of training should make him better able to calm his breathing. Each muscle like a tool, that’s what he’d always been taught, body like a weapon. It feels now more like an animal. A horse gone snow-blind, bucking its rider wildly off. Cullen sits up with a groan, kneads at his temples. He should not have allowed himself to sleep so deeply. A dangerous thing to be pulled so thoroughly into dreams. A luxury he has never been afforded. Will probably never be, not with the way things have begun to unfold. The Chantry’s continued condemnation, the templars balking under the new yoke of the Inquisition. Each day the war table becomes more crowded.

Cullen runs his palm along the back of his neck, finds it clammy, damp. He smooths both hands down his body. Shoulder to chest, to hips. All down his legs. Taking an inventory. After dreams like that he has to. Has to find a quiet reassurance that he is all in one piece. Which he is, mostly. Cullen winces when his fingers find the rope burn from a training exercise that’s been smarting across his left bicep for what feels like a fortnight. But he’s altogether fine. On the outside at least. When he takes another long exhale, he catches just the faintest whiff of burning hearth from below. Then something else, something sweeter. Andraste’s grace, he realizes, those small sweet wildflowers that used to grow along the banks of Lake Calanhad. His temples pulse. That had always been Greagoir’s preference. He used to dry the flowers on his hearth to fill the room with the scent, used to laugh that it was the only way he could get the First Enchanter to set foot in his office. The memory bubbles up unbidden and Cullen runs his fingers roughly through his own hair, like he can assure himself the dream is done just through the sheer force of the sensation.

It’s hard to think about Kinloch now, as it had been in his memories, untinged by the nightmare of the Circle’s fall. A home. The place he had lived longest in all his life. Safe and familiar. When he thinks of it now, all he can see the sharp edges around the doors, the curve of the stone halls inward. Maker, so much stone. Like a tomb. Cullen stands, rolling his shoulders. How would it be to go back there now? Older. Wiser in perhaps all the wrong ways. Would it feel freeing to walk through those halls in armor not of the Order? Unleashed. Cullen wheezes a laugh, wiping sweat from his brow. His daily headache is already starting, the stars still bright in the night sky. Unleashed indeed.

The water in his basin is cool from the night air. Cullen splashes it over his face. He leans heavily on the table, one hand on each side of it. The quiet chatter from the barracks below drifts upward. He closes his eyes and just listens. They’d erected the barracks in a hurry and every so often, when the wind hits the thatched roof just right, the walls tremble, floor shifting under his feet. Another reminder of how unprepared they are to face this, whatever it is Cullen shakes his hands to rid them of water. He imagines, smoothing his hair back with his palms, that all a return to Kinloch Hold would make him feel is empty. The guilt he feels at just drawing breath echoing against those old stone walls, magnified by seeing it quiet and still, not ravaged by abominatios. Even in those months after Amell freed the tower, he’d seen nothing but terrors in every corner, the stone warping before his eyes. He cannot imagine it another way. Although, he reminds himself, sitting again down on his cot, head in his hands, letting the warmth of his breath skitter through his fingers, there is probably nothing left of the Hold now. Thus far he’s intentionally avoided any of Leliana’s reports on Kinloch in the wake of the Rebellion. No need to open anymore old wounds. Not when they already ache.

Cullen kneads at his eyes again before inhaling loudly, straightening up. He thinks to pray but stops himself. With the dream so close at hand and his body aching for lyrium as it does so often in the morning, prayer would only reawaken that terror. He had prayed so long in that chamber, been so starved of lyrium that the first draught after his rescue had felt like being reborn. Cullen laughs bitterly at the memory, his head already pounding even in the faint light. It’ll pass, he knows. The mornings and evenings are the hardest, mind wandering without distraction. Quiet, alone. He lays back onto his stiff mattress and entertains the idea of trying to go back to sleep. The chattering from the barracks below has quieted, a distant owl hoots, the sound cutting through the pleasant chill of the night. His bones are weary but each time he closes his eyes something stirs inside of him, turns the gears of his brain.

It had not been unlike the dreams that visit him each night, this dream, though Amell’s appearance had been rather different. Especially as she was there, bosom straining the fabric of her robes. A reminder, he thinks perhaps, from his body that it has been more than a year since he last lay with a woman. The last had been a young merchant woman with whom he’d set up a metals trade for the Order after Meredith’s death. The hair at the crux of her legs had been the same copper color as on her head. He’d brushed his hand over the silvery marks across her belly. A babe that died in the winter. _I knew you’d be gentle,_ her voice soft in the quiet of her room, and he’d blushed from temple to hips. Always so boyish. Always so ashamed of it. 

But there’s no raw need in him now aside from lyrium. His cock is soft against his thigh and he is burning up. Cullen raises himself onto his elbows, gazing out through the window beyond his cot. It is the darkest part of the night. Even with the breach swirling above, it seems endless. It might be nice, he thinks wiping sweat from his brow, to go out into it.

He’d spied the creek only a few days before when he took a group of recruits out to train amongst the higher drifts of snow. A natural spring, he assumed, by the way the earth around it remained untouched by snow, not even a hint of ice across the water.

In the darkness it seems to almost glitter. The surface reflecting the warped edges of the breach, casting light up against the pines at its shores. Cullen strips his tunic from his, then his breaches and leaves them carefully at the water’s edge before coming closer, letting the water lap at his toes. The chill a pleasant sensation on his skin.

It’s been a long time since he’s walked through the world without armor. So long he can hardly remember what it feels like to be so weightless, unburdened. He’d worn it even aboard the ship, had to scrub salt from his pauldrons for days when they finally landed on Fereldan shores.

Cullen wades into the waters, his exhale pluming in the night sky. Speckled with stars, even against the breach. This far from Haven the land is so quiet he can almost become another man. The breach just an overlarge harvest moon at his back. He wades until the water reaches his bare hips, watches the ripples draw outward from his waist. He’d spent so little time outside in Kirkwall. And even less in Kinloch. Just out in the wilderness, as he had as a boy. Cullen ducks his head under, coming up and shaking his hair out like a mangy mabari and it feels freeing in a way he can hardly understand himself. Makes him smile into up toward the night sky. 

Cullen runs his hands along his arms, his chest, paying special attention to a few shallowed wounds along one side of his ribs. They’re from sparring the afternoon before. With the Iron Bull. He’d needed that. After months of training with raw recruits it had been bracing to go toe to toe with the qunari. A reminder of his own power, his own strength. Cullen has the sneaking suspicion that perhaps that was the Iron Bull’s plan all along. A quiet sort of comradery blooming between the two men since his arrival from the Storm Coast. It’s been a long time since Cullen had a friend. He isn’t sure what to do even do with the idea.

A lone bird calls from the top of the nearby trees, the pine boughs shivering int eh gentle wind. Cullen cups his hands and fills them with cool water, splashing it over his chest. It feels almost strange to clean himself like this. He so often does it in a rush in the barracks. This feels almost meditative and a spike of guilt rockets through him. He has no love for feeling this intimate with his own body. It is a tool like any other. One he must keep clean and cared for. He feels no great affection for it. Though it _has_ kept him alive. Through much. He can feel some pride in that at least, some reverence. And the maker gave it to him, he reminds himself, the whispered back end of a half-remembered canticle on his lips. He finishes hurriedly, dressing himself hastily at the edge of the water. 

Perhaps it is the remnants of the Circle that have his eyes so trained to her. She comes round from the back Chantry and he stops where he stands at the crest of the stairs away from the merchants. He tenses immediately, hand finding the hilt of his sword before he schools himself out of it. In the Circle he would have immediately approached her, demanded to know her reason for being out this late, out alone. He would have reprimanded her surely. In Kirkwall, she may even been censured. But he is not in Kirkwall. Or Kinlock. And so instead he slows his pace and tries to come up with some manner of light conversation he might offer when the two inevitably cross paths. She’s walking in the night, just as he is. Perhaps plagued by some manner of nightmare. Just as he. Nightmares, he thinks with a light chuckle, are not topics for light conversation. And so he stays frozen, there at the stop of the stairs, watching her as he comes round from the back. Flakes of snow rest gently on the fur of her cloak. Her dark hair unbound about her shoulders. When she ducks into the light of one of the Chantry’s front sconces, he spots Varric and nearly turns heel. Too many long hours on the damned boat. Too many long hours now shirking his attempts at conversation. He does not need any reminders of his own failure, reminders of the Champion, especially not delivered with that wry smile. But it seems, he thinks, almost fondly, that the mage is equally overwhelmed by the dwarf, her head bobbing in time with his bombastic hands. Which warms him some, makes the heaviness inside of him that remerged so quickly after he emerged from the chilly spring a little lighter. But she looks weary too. And she looks afraid. His chest tightens and he quiets a sudden urge to go speak to her. To assure her. Of what? He has no assurances. Least of all for a mage. Cullen turns away, looks out toward the trebuchets. Toward the mountains beyond. There is something sinister about those hills, the breach reflecting on their snowcapped peaks. He tightens his grip on his hilt and when he turns back to the Chantry, the mage is gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you like a real slow burn ;)

Orianna goes with the dwarf because she is caught. And maybe that’s what the Circle has done to her, whittled her down. Her first instinct to follow orders, to bow her head. For all her bluster, all her rage, she had not, to her white-hot humiliation, even thought to use magic. The impulse trained so cleanly out of her. Beaten out, in those last years It had taken months in Redcliffe to grow accustom to even lighting her own candles with magic. That fear so deeply engrained. Worn grooves, open wounds. Here, where it feels as though the whole breadth of the Templar Order has gathered, she had locked it even deeper away inside herself. Perched on that wall like a little animal, all feral terror. Something that the dwarf below her was utterly unphased by. She’d been coaxed reluctantly down by a few off-color jokes, by the sudden animal shivering that had overtaken her body, a harsh reminder of her night on the mountain in the storm.

Orianna stays with the dwarf because the tavern is perhaps the nicest place she has ever been. A little shabby – the split log walls look as though they’d been erected in a great hurry and a few times, when the polar wind howls past, the thatched roof seems to shiver – but it’s warm in a simple way that Orianna isn’t sure she’s ever experienced before. The two hearths crackle in the middle of the room, casting the whole of it in as soft, golden orange. The air smells like roasting meat and burning cedar and a buttery, malted scent she doesn’t recognize. Chatter fills the space, steady and just below what she can hear, soothing like the soft buzzing of insects in summer.

Orianna warms her hands in her cloak, glances furtively around the room. If there are templars here, they’re not in armor. And if there are mages, they haven’t brought their staffs. Most of the people here seem to be workers, simple soldiers. Orianna hadn’t really considered them before. Even in Redcliffe, all they talked about were mages and templars. Mages and templars and Circles and bloodshed. Accords with the Divine and traitorous First Enchanters. As the dwarf leads them toward the back of the tavern, Orianna overhears a man in a fur cap complain about an early frost, a woman at the table just beyond slams a deck of cards down onto the worn, wooden table, laughing.

“Varric,” the dwarf says, patting the back of a wooden chair before taking a seat in one of his own, “Varric Tethras. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Orianna pauses, her hands on the back of the chair. Her thoughts drift backwards. The hush after the candles have been snuffed, small sparks of light under quilts, the soft sound of a book sliding quickly out from under a bed. “Your name sounds familiar. Where would I have heard it before?”

Varric chuckles. “Nowhere good.” He gestures again to the chair. “Sit, sit. Warm up some.” She does after some hesitation, pulling her cloak tighter around her so the fur hood rises up, feels like a cocoon. “And you’re Orianna Trevelyan.”

She stiffens, feeling suddenly as though every eye in the tavern is on her. But none of them are, save Varric’s. No one seems to have even noticed them arrive. She settles, releasing her grip on her cloak, setting her hands down onto the table. “How did you know?”

Varric chuckles, settling back into the chair. The light from the hearth behind makes the red of his hair look aflame, the gold of his many rings glittering along his fingers. “Believe it or not, all the Trevelyans bear more than a passing resemblance to one another.” Orianna swallows. “And besides,” he says with another chuckle and a flourish of his hand, “only someone pig-headed from the void and back would take to shimmying over a back wall in the middle of a snowstorm and I’ve spent enough time with Evie to know that runs in the family too.”

Orianna squirms. She knows it’s supposed to be a joke but the way he’s calling her a Trevelyan feels like sloughing on an old skin. It feels wrong, grating. “I don’t know her very well.” Her voice is its own memory, falling back now into that familiar stiff cadence. She can almost feel herself peering up at a templar, their eyes just slats through the armor. She tries to shake it off, inhaling deeply, shifting a little in the seat.

If Varric notices, he doesn’t draw attention to it. “Sure, sure. You like ale?”

It all seems so silly. To be sitting here in this tavern, the window for her escape rapidly closing with each moment she delays. How is she going to look Adan in the eyes in the morning? How is going to look at herself? But the hearth is so warm, the quiet chatter so pleasant. At the table just beside them, a card game is in full swing. This is like a place she’s only read about in books. “I’ve never had it.”

Varric clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Just criminal, those Circles.”

She doesn’t like the taste, but she does the way the ale softens her. Makes her feel outside herself, like she’s slipped into another skin. And Varric cushions the feeling. Telling wild stories, talking with his hands. She laughs, loudly, freely, for first time in so long. Since those first days in Redcliff when the sky felt so broad and endless. She feels a little in love. With everyone in the room, with the warp of the wood table, with the softness of her own skin.

And so it’s all the more abrupt when Varric turns, still chuckling, to look at her, and asks, “So I heard it was Curly who picked you up off that mountainside.”

Orianna’s smile fades. She’d nearly forgotten herself. Where she is, what’s happened. She clears her throat, straightens her shoulders. “Curly?”

“Cullen.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know who you mean.”

“You mean to tell me that you’ve already forgotten the grim, brooding ex-templar who plucked you from that storm?”

Orianna stiffens. “ _Ex_ \- templar?” But before Varric can reply, a rush of cold air fills the tavern. A templar, in full regalia, steps through the front door. A few of the men she’d seen earlier straighten to attention and she realizes with a dawning horror that they had been templars all along. The fully regaled templar sweeps his gaze across the room. It lingers on Orianna for only a moment but it’s long enough for her whole body to go cold. She feels as though she might be sick, as though she might faint. She feels, deep and dark inside herself, as if she could kill him. This templar. As if she could light him aflame and the terror that uncoils inside of her, the ragged desire, is so frightening she can barely draw breath. Varric is speaking again, laughing. She can’t hear him. Her ears are ringing like Chantry bells.

It’s a clear night when she ventures out from the Tavern. The stars still blotted out near the breach, but further, where the darkness has not completely receded, they are resplendent. Varric fored her to swear an oath before she left that she was not venturing out toward the mountain again. _At least not until morning,_ he’d said with a grin and it had softened the blow of the templars in the Tavern. Some at least. She can still feel their gaze, like it’s seared into her skin.

She inhales deeply, passing the spymaster's tent, heading down toward Haven’s heavy front gates. She has a mind to stand on the shores of the lake, to listen to the quiet sound of the ice cracking over the water, to look at the moon’s shivering reflection in the dark water at the center, still untouched by winter. But when she crosses through the gates, Orianna stops in her tracks, He’s there. In full armor. Only just a few feet from her.

He’s just finished sparring as far as she can tell, his brow slick with sweat, the straw dummy curved a little back from the force of his blows, the tip of his sword resting in the snow. Cullen. A good Fereldan name for a good Fereldan boy. Orianna slips her hood over her head, peers at him through the fur. He straightens, rolling his shoulders back, and she is reminded of his bulk. Tall and broad. Has to be, she imagines, to swing that heavy sword, carry that shield. Carry her. The thought sparks a quick flare of something she does not recognize and easily discards. It is replaced by an old fear. Of being caught out late in the Circle, an armored hand steering her roughly back to the mages’ quarters. He cannot hurt her, she reminds herself, not here, not now at least. And he is, at least according to Varric, no longer even a templar. So she watches him, lets herself luxuriate in this foreign feeling of watching a templar so openly. He seems to notice her from the corner of his eyes, straightens up. He runs a gloved hand over his hair, raises it in greeting. She doesn’t return it, stares down at him until he is the one to turn away. Orianna frowns, the luster from this power play quickly fading. He looks almost weary from this distance, slumped as though his armor has become suddenly too heavy for him. And there, in the snow beside the training dummies, the whole mountain range at his back, he looks very, very alone. Both of them are, out here in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Excuse the worse than usual editing. I plan to go back in and make some corrections but I just wanted to get this chapter out into the world.

_Meredith would adore her._

It’s the first thought he has when the commotion starts just past the tents, toward where the dense old-growth forest meets the pounded, scattered, earth where they run drills. Meredith would single her out right away. Would know, just by a single glance, exactly what kind of mage she is. _A problem,_ she would say, the high tenor of her voice always disarming him, even toward the end when it had become a groove in his own mind. _This one will be a problem._ And though the tone of her voice would be one of grave resignation, she would always have a smile on her face. Her newest obsession, newest toy. One nearly every week. Sometimes more. At the end. She would watch them with a quiet glee. Sift and sift and sift until she found something with which to act. Laying in wait. Like a predator on the hunt. And then she would watch them again, when it was over, the brand flushing the light from their eyes, with a faraway relish. He hadn’t seen it then. The pattern, the pleasure. Not like he does now. And it has him hesitating just beyond the tents even as their voices continue to rise, even as his men slow in their training, turn to him. The young templar has not yet drawn her sword and Orianna’s hands are fisted at her sides. But their voices are rising. Orianna practically hissing; the templar recruit with her hand now on the pommel of her sword. Cullen raises his hand to his own. An echo. Of the woman, of the man he used to be. Orianna raises one hand, electricity whips through the cold air, the sweet smell of lyrium thick around him. Cullen tightens his grip on the pommel, he moves past the tents, toward the shouting. He isn’t running but his strides lengthen toward them. Orianna has her hand held up in the air and the whole world seems to slow around it. Nothing is happening; everything is happening. If this were Kirkwall, she would be dead. No tribunal, no deliberation, no rite of tranquility. If this were Kirkwall, Orianna would be dead. Cullen sheaths his sword, releases the pommel.

Orianna seems to have almost recoiled from herself by the time Cullen makes his way across the field to them. Her raised hand a little lower, her magic churning but still only inside herself. The young templar seems to have done the same, her sword only half out of her sheath, eyes widened, jaw so tight Cullen’s teeth ache just looking. They’ve both frozen there just at the edge of the forest, the fire outside the templar woman’s tent just popping embers. And it makes him realize, with a sudden sharp clarity, how young they both are. Or perhaps young isn’t right. He’s gone through Orianna’s papers, knows that she is only a few years younger than he. And while quite obviously a recruit, the templar standing opposite her, fingers still curled around the grip of her sword, is no child either. He imagines, though, that her first real fight had been in the still burning ashes of the Temple. And he knows too that Orianna has spent her whole life in the circle, that maybe she’s never used her magic before, not against another. The faint curl of boyish fear he’d felt as he approached, that twinge at the base of his skull, unfurls. And he is a soldier again, a man. He is the Commander of this army. He _will_ retain order.

He lays his gloved hand on Orianna’s shoulder. She tenses, every muscle in her body going rigid but she does not move away from him. “That’s enough.” Neither looks at him, still locked in each other’s gaze. He tightens his grip, just gently, on Orianna’s shoulder, steers her a little away, leans down so their eyes meet. Hers just the same as the Herald’s. But so much more alive. Aflame, sparking. They have not been tempered as the Herald’s have. “Take it easy,” he says, gentling his voice, “I know how you must feel to among so many templars but…” He trails off, unsure now what he meant to say.

All the muscles in her face seem the clench at once, her nose scrunching. The hiss of her voice so sharp it feels “Don’t act so familiar. You know _nothing_ of me.” And then she seems to realize that he has a hand on her and twists away from him so violently she nearly goes tumbling backward. She swats away the hand he offers, finding her footing near the dying fire. “Don’t you dare touch me, templar. You have no right.” Orianna gives the young templar one last look, then gives him one equally withering, before stalking off toward the Chantry. Varric waits at the tops of the stairs, drawn no doubt by the sound of the shouting. He waves her toward him and Orianna hurries to his side. Cullen kneads the bridge of his nose. Maker, _of course,_ he would have taken her under his wing.

“Knight Commander.”

Cullen straightens, turns. The woman stands at attention. He recognizes himself in her face. The man he had been so long ago, just a boy. Full of indigent pride, so sure of his own rightness. He clears his throat, turns to face her full on. “Just Commander. And that’s enough from you as well.”

The recruit blinks at him, rocks a little back. Lysette, he remembers, though he isn’t sure exactly how. One of the few templars they managed to pull from the ruins of the Temple, besieged by demons. She still has a deep cut on one cheek, healing unevenly, her skin ruddy from the cold, from the hot fires his men keep burning into the night. She narrows her eyes at him, working her jaw. “With all due respect, Knight Commander, the mage was the instigator.”

Cullen looks over his shoulder at the steps leading past the gate. Orianna is gone now but she’s left the zing of her magic in her wake, still drifting through the air. He turns back to Lysette. She is standing now with her hands in fists at her sides, the metal pieces of her gauntlets sticking out sharp like craggy rock. “Of that, I have no doubt.” Her expression softens. “But I expect the templars among us to not rise to such provocation.” She looks deflated, heavy in her armor, eyes darting toward the barrack tents. Cullen softens his tone. “Our problems are bigger now than mages and templars. We would all do well to remember that.” The woman’s nose twitches, her lips purse up. “Do not antagonize them. You are with the Order no longer.” The way she looks at him cuts to the quick. Like a traitor. He feels branded by it and he can look at her no longer. Cullen turns. All his men are watching. A whole regiment stood looking right at him. “Carry on.” His voice booms across the field. And they do. At his word. His temples pulse.

Cullen finds Cassandra on the far end of the field, where the ice upon the lake has begun to crack. A loud, eerie sound at night when the commotion of the day has quieted to a soft hum. She is flushed and slick from sparring but seems unsurprised when he approaches her from the side, when he proposes an escort for the Lady Trevelyan. Not a templar, but a soldier. Cassandra does not turn to look at him, stands examining her blade, the pocked water reflecting against its shine. “I will certainly bring up the idea with the Herald upon her return.”

The evening air is so chilled that Cullen’s own breath billows out like a fog but he feels as though he is burning up, every muscle in his body fraying with need. He grits his teeth, tries to push the sensation from the fore of his mind. “Is this your way of brushing me off?”

Cassandra pauses, her own breath a wide plum, then looks over her shoulder at him. “No one was hurt.”

He rubs his palm across his neck. “This time.” She turns all the way around, raises a single eyebrow. Cullen sighs, exasperated. “I understand many an eye is upon me and I understand why but I do not think I am a reactionist for wanting _some_ level of oversight for the mages in our midst.”

“I do not disagree with you, Commander.” Even here, even breathless from exertion, her voice is the same slow, honeyed Navarran clip he’d first heard when she arrived in Kirkwall, nearly a year ago now. “But the mages are my responsibility. The soldiers are yours.” It’s fine, her answer. Relief in some way. To be relieved of this duty. Of having to make any decisions about it at all. He made so many wrong ones standing beside Meredith, helmed so much suffering. He says nothing to her, and she nothing to him, and turns back toward his troops, his men, stiff from the cold but yet pressing on.

The three of them stand at Haven’s ruined far gate to greet the Herald upon her return. As has become customary. Cullen at the center. Leliana to his right. Josephine beside him at the left, bouncing a little on her heels. She is lost deep in thought and unlike Leliana who becomes a stone as she thinks, Josephine reminds him of a small bird. A flurry of movement, the jewels sewn into the fabric of her clothes glittering as she does. He has heard rumor of some business with a Maquis about the rightful ownership of Haven. Trifles he does not trouble himself with but that no doubt he will now have to be privy to in the war room when the Herald will ask for a full accounting of the few weeks she has been gone.

To the Hinterlands again. A pinprick on the map that has become a vast, unmanageable problem. Requisitions orders they can barely keep pace with and reports of staggering causalities, mostly civilians. The Herald, at least from his vantage though, appears to be in good spirits. Flanked by the Iron Bull and the elven apostate. And so when she approaches him first he assumes it is to make yet another joke at his expense. “A favor,” she says, taking him aside. She pulls a neatly folded paper from her satchel “A letter on a dead templar. Maybe you can find out who he was, notify his family.”

Cullen frowns, glances from the parchment to her and back. “Why this one?”

“Pardon?”

“I, um, I don’t imagine this is the only dead templar you encountered in the hinterlands.” Her eyelids flutter, briefly, like her thoughts have become too thick to wade through. One side of her mouth ticks downward, then into a wistful smile. She closes his fingers over the parchment. 

_I don't know how this will reach you, but_

_with the last strength of my shaking hands,_

_what else could i do but write you?_

He has read it once, but his head has started its nightly process of splitting at the seams. And he needs to understand it. To understand why the Herald would have given him this, why it has made him feel gutted to his core. Weatherworn parchment, written in a hurried hand. He bends over it, the waning candlelight in his quarters casting long shadows across the paper.

_Whether it be the magic of this cursed_

_Breach or the Maker punishing me for_

_abandoning my vows, the end is coming._

He has stripped off his armor, down to just his tunic and breeches. He can feel the breeze through the narrow windows in his room but it does not soothe him, makes him feel thin as the parchment under his fingers.

_With your phylactery, i knew_

_just where you were, but the madness of_

_your side and mine was too great a gap._

_Maker save you. Stay safe. You need no_

_Circle if you carry it within you._

He can still remember Amell in that hallway. The first time she’d teased him but far from the first time he’d noticed her. The swell of her breast, her eyes alight. A fire he’d seen today. In the Lady Trevelyan. A burning. So much greater than his own. Such a spark. Trapped there in that tower. Them both. His head hurts. Terribly. So terribly. Cullen holds his head in his hands then flexes his fingers. He makes a note to have Leliana search records for the templar who signed in his shaky dying hand his name. They don’t have the resources for such a useless errand, they don’t have the time. Cullen seas the request. He stands, pulls his linen tunic over his heat. His skin is slick with sweat, the shadows of the fire dancing over it. He could burn up from the inside if he let himself. Cullen bends over, splashes some cool water from the basin over his face. Outside his men sleep, the breach widens, and a mage wanders their ranks with a fire inside of her that he recognizes but does not fear. He’s always been a fool.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
